Mysticism in France contrasts strikingly, in this respect, with mysticism in Germany. Speaking generally, it may be said that France exhibits the mysticism of sentiment, Germany the mysticism of thought. The French love to generalize and to classify. An arrangement which can be expressed by a word, a principle which can be crystallized into a sparkling maxim, they will applaud. But with them conventionalism reigns paramount—society is ever present to the mind of the individual—their sense of the ludicrous is exquisitely keen. The German loves abstractions for their own sake. To secure popularity for a visionary error in France, it must be lucid and elegant as the language—it must be at least an ingenious and intelligible falsehood; but in Germany, the most grotesque inversions of thought and of expression will be found no hindrance to its acceptability, and the most hopeless obscurity may be pronounced its highest merit. In this respect, German philosophy sometimes resembles Lycophron, who was so convinced that unintelligibility was grandeur, as to swear he would hang himself if a man were found capable of understanding his play of Cassandra. Almost every later German mystic has been a secluded student—almost every mystic of modern France has been a brilliant conversationalist. The genius of mysticism rises, in Germany, in the clouds of the solitary pipe; in France, it is a fashionable Ariel, who hovers in the drawing-room, and hangs to the pendants of the glittering chandelier. If Jacob Behmen had appeared in France, he must have counted disciples by units, where in Germany he reckoned them by hundreds. If Madame Guyon had been born in Germany, rigid Lutheranism might have given her some annoyance; but her earnestness would have redeemed her enthusiasm from ridicule, and she would have lived and died the honoured precursor of modern German Pietism. The simplicity and strength of purpose which characterize so many of the German mystics, appear to much advantage beside the vanity and affectation which have so frequently attended the manifestations of mysticism in France. In Germany, theosophy arose with the Reformation, and was as much a theology as a science. In France, where the Reformation had been suppressed, and where superstition had been ridiculed with such success, the same love of the marvellous was most powerful with the most irreligious—it filled the antechamber of Cagliostro with impatient dandies and grandees, trembling, and yet eager to pry into the future—too enlightened to believe in Christ, yet too credulous to doubt the powers of a man before whose door fashion drew, night after night, a line of carriages which filled the street.
Note to page 245.
A full account of the proceedings against the Quietists will be found in the narrative above referred to and in Arnold’s Kirchen-und-Ketzer Geschichte, th. III. cap. xvii.
The motive of Père La Chaise in urging this prosecution appears to have been twofold: partly, to start heretics whom his Most Christian Majesty might magnificently hunt, and still more to weaken the Spanish party and embarrass the Pope, who was suspected of leaning toward the house of Austria. The audacity of the Jesuits—so formidable always, from their numbers, their union, their unscrupulousness, and now emboldened by support so powerful, struck all Rome with terror. A man widely reputed for sanctity, throughout a period of twenty years—an honoured guest within the walls of the Vatican—who had long enjoyed, and not yet forfeited, the warm friendship of the Head of the Church—was suddenly declared the most dangerous enemy to the faith of Christendom. To accomplish the ruin of this victim, a venerable pontiff was threatened with the most grievous insult which infallibility could suffer. Within a month, two hundred persons were thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition,—and many of these were eminent for rank, for learning, or for piety. Only the grossly stupid or the scandalously dissolute could feel themselves secure. To hint a question concerning the justice of a single step in prosecutions remarkable, even at Rome, for the baseness and illegality of their agents and their acts—to live a quiet and retiring life—to appear infrequently at confession or at mass,—these were circumstances sufficient to render any man suspected of Quietism; and if the informer were hungry, or a private enemy alert, from suspicion to conviction was but a step.
But the persecutors were destined to meet with many mortifications in their course. Molinos and his friend Petrucci—a bishop, and afterwards a cardinal—defended themselves, on their first summons, with such skill and intrepidity, that the writings which had been circulated against them were condemned as libellous. The case of Petrucci represents that of the great majority against whom the charge of Quietism was brought. Not an accusation could be substantiated, save this,—that blameless as his life might be, he had grown remiss in some of those outward observances which are the pride of Pharisaic sanctity. Thus defeated at the outset, the Jesuits were reinforced and rendered victorious by the falsehoods of D’Etrees, who refused to hear a word Molinos had to say in defence of his own writings. The Count and Countess Vespiniani were arrested, with other persons, to the number of seventy. They were accused of omitting the exterior practices of religion, and of giving themselves to solitude and prayer. The Countess bravely answered, that she had discovered her manner of devotion only to her confessor; he must have betrayed her; who but idiots would confess, if confession was made the engine of the persecutor—if no secret was sacred—if to confess might be to lie at the mercy of a villain? Henceforward she would confess to God alone. A rank so high must be respected. Words so bold were dangerous. So the Vespiniani were set free. The circular letter sent out against the Quietists was treated with indifference by most of the Italian bishops—not unleavened, many of them, by this obnoxious kind of piety. Nay, worse! for once, an epistle from the Inquisition was published. The unfortunate letter escaped somehow—was translated into Italian—all Rome was reading it. The world looked in on the procedure of the Holy Office, to the shame and bitter vexation of its holy men. It was said that the Inquisition collected some twenty thousand letters, or copies of letters, sent and received by Molinos, and that when he was arrested, twenty crowns’ worth of letters addressed to him were seized at the post-office. So extended was the influence of the heretic—so little likely, therefore, to perish with him. Some ecclesiastics had the candour to admit that most of the Quietists showed themselves better instructed than their accusers, and confronted their judges so ably, with passages, authorities, and arguments, that they could only be silenced by authority and force.
The letter of Cardinal Caraccioli to Innocent, about the Quietists, represents them as persons who attempt passive mental prayer and ‘contemplatio,’ without the previous preparation of the ‘via purgativa.’ Dreadful to relate, some of them had been known to leave their rosaries unfingered, to refuse to make the sign of the cross, to declare crucifixes rather in their way than otherwise! They trusted rather to their inward attraction than to directors. Some, though laymen, and though married, communed daily—an ominous sign—for it betokened the lowering (in their minds, at least) of that high partition wall, which Rome had made so strong, between clergy and laity—between the religious par excellence and the vulgar herd of Christians, who were to be saved only through the former. See Bausset’s Histoire de Fénélon, liv. ii.; Pièces Justificatives, No. II.
Note to page 259.
Fénélon could with ease bring from the arsenal of tradition even more proofs than he needed for the establishment of his doctrine. No prevarication or sophistry could conceal the fact that Bernard, Albertus Magnus, Francis de Sales, Theresa, Catharine of Genoa, and other saints, had used language concerning pure love, authenticating more than all that Fénélon was solicitous to defend. Thus much was proven,—even subtracting those passages which Fénélon unwittingly cited from an edition of De Sales’ Entretiens, said to be full of interpolations. The spiritual history of Friar Laurent and of Francis de Sales furnished actual examples of the most extreme case Fénélon was willing to put. Bossuet’s true answer was the reply he gave on the question to Madame de la Maisonfort,—such rare and extraordinary cases should be left out of our consideration, they should not be drawn within the range of possible experience, even for Christians considerably advanced. (Phelipeaux, liv. i. pp. 165-176.) In dispute with Fénélon, instead of admitting the fact, as with La Maisonfort, the polemic gets uppermost, and he tries very dishonestly to explain away the language of De Sales, while he misrepresents and garbles that of Fénélon. See Cinquième Lettre en Réponse à divers Ecrits; Première Lettre en Réponse à celle de M. L’Evêque de Meaux; Maximes des Saints, art. v.
Fénélon draws a subtile distinction between the object of love and the motive of love. That love in God which renders him our eternal blessedness, is among the objects of our love—for God has so revealed himself, but is not the motive of it. (Max. des Saints, art. iv.) Do we desire happiness less, he asks, because we desire it from a worthy motive,—i.e., as desired by God? Do we extinguish hope by exalting and regulating it? (Entretiens sur la Religion; Œuvres, tom. i. p. 35.) If any one of us knew that he should be annihilated at death, ought he less to love the infinitely Good? Is not eternal life a gift which God is free to grant or to withhold? Shall the love of the Christian who is to have eternal life be less than that of him who anticipates annihilation, just because the love of God to him is so much more? Shall such a gift serve only to make love interested? (Sur le Pur Amour, xix. Compare also Max. des Saints, art. 10, 11, 12; Correspondance, let. 43.)
Fénélon is very careful to state that disinterested love is put to its most painful proof only in rare and extreme cases,—that the love which is interested is not a sin, only a lower religious stage, and that he who requires that staff is to beware how he throws it aside prematurely, ambitious of a spiritual perfection which may be beyond his reach. Bossuet endeavoured to show that if Fénélon’s doctrine were true, any love except the disinterested was a crime. (Instructions et Avis, &c., xx.; Sur le Pur Amour, p. 329; Max. des Saints, art. iii., and sundry qualifications of importance, concerning self-abandonment in the ‘épreuves extrêmes,’ art. ix.)